Craftsman Bookends

I decided I needed some bookends to match all of the craftsman furniture I’ve been building so I made 3 sets of them plus one extra that I used to figure out the details. As usual, they are cherry with walnut highlights and 3X Motawi tiles. They are finished with polyurethane over linseed oil.

Instead of messing around with all of the small walnut trim details I made solid pieces and then drilled a dowel hole to align all of the pieces. The sides are tapered (another chance to use the taper jig). The added twist was that both sides are tapered so I used the scrap piece from the first side to shim it out when I flipped it over to cut the second side. The tapered shim pushed all the way to the bottom provided a very accurate way to get the same angle on the taper.

The body of the book end is solid. A few scrap pieces and I had a slick jig for the router to make the openings for the tiles. I added a trio of walnut tapered plugs to finish out the look.

Of course this wouldn’t be a woodworking project without a “signature”. If you look, one set has the walnut accents flipped. I put the top accents on the bottom and didn’t realize until it was glued up. So they are my “variation” on a theme.

-- Earl "I'm a pessamist - generally that increases the chance that things will turn out better than expected"